"In The Birth of the Clinic, the philosopher and social theorist Michel Foucault described how this revolutionary change in education altered the doctor-patient relationship: 'The presence of disease in the body with its tensions and its burnings, the silent world of the entrails, the whole dark underside of the body lined with endless unseen dreams, are challenged as to their objectivity by the reductive discourse of the doctor, as well as established as multiple objects needing his positive gaze.' Foucault asserted that this style of medical education brought with it a distanced view of patients, which he referred to as the clinical gaze. Before clinical medicine, doctors had little to go on in diagnosis besides a patient's complaints and the outward manifestations of the alleged disease on the body. Primarily working with the wealthy, these doctors saw few patients and had widely divergent levels of training. They also didn't interact as frequently with one another as they do today, nor was there constant continuing education now required. Their viewpoints were rather limited. The Paris School brought a scientific structure to the art of medicine and created a foundation for shared medical knowledge. It also encouraged systematic ways of learning about the body and diseases, including cadaver exploration and the use of instruments to allow doctors to observe patients' bodies in ways patients themselves could not. The human body became a less mysterious landscape, and the patient, too, was transformed into an object to be studied, consisting of organs and the diseases that attack them. Along the way, the medical profession lost sight of the patient as a person in favor of the patient as a collection of symptoms and manifestations or a soulless cadaver on a dissecting table. Foucault pointed out the inherent tension between hospitals servicing the sick and educating the doctors. He argued that, in fact, we all benefit from the advances resulting from a grossly unequal exchange. 'But to look in order to know, to show in order to teach, is not this a tacit form of violence, all the more abusive for its silence on a sick body that demands to be comforted, not displayed? Can pain be a spectacle? Not only can it be, but it must be. By virtue of a subtle right that resides in the fact that no one is alone, the poor man less so than others since he can obtain assistance only through the mediation of the rich. Since disease can be cured only if others intervene with their knowledge, their resources, their pity, since a patient can be cured only in society, it is just that that the illnesses of some should be transformed into the experience of others.' The rich invest in hospitals. The poor get treated. The knowledge gained by the doctors through observation of the poor can be used to better treat the rich. The clinical gaze extended to the way the collective body of the sick was viewed as a commodity."
